I've been thinking about how to support hash-iterate-first and
hash-iterate-next in Whalesong. In Whalesong, my functional hash
implementation is based on left-leaning red-black trees. The
hash-iterate-* functions are a little weird for me since they return
numbers, and I had expected them to produce some opaque, structured
value.
Since I can only use numbers, it makes iteration weirder since I'm
dealing with a non-linear structure. I cooked up a quick prototype of
an approach:
http://www.wescheme.org/openEditor?publicId=shady-clunk-blase-saber-decay
treating the number as binary digits, and using it as a description of
a path through the tree.
Is this a reasonable approach?